Tag Archives: solving

This is not just a problem facing police in low-income urban communities. Rich and gentrifying San Francisco clears only half of its murders, Palm Beach and Long Island only one-third.

Certainly we expect our laws to be honored and justice to be served. But more fundamentally, people are safer when crimes are solved. Homicide rates are highly correlated with clearance rates. If you live in a municipality with below-average clearance rates, you are twice as likely to be murdered. Plus, we know from social science research that the risk of being caught or arrested is what deters criminal behavior, not longer prison sentences. These folks have short time horizons. Catch the perpetrator, you will deter future crime. It should come as no surprise that, as Chicago has struggled with a wave of gang-related murders, the city’s murder clearance rate plummeted to a horrifying 20 percent.

It took nearly 23 years to identify Fred Laster’s body and the man detectives believe killed him, but officials hope this case will be a catalyst that changes police policy.

When Fred’s siblings reported him missing more than two decades ago, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office never informed the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

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Fred was 16 when he was last seen in Jacksonville in June 1994. One of his sisters told police he was last seen with his youth pastor, Ronnie Leon Hyde. There is no record of officers contacting Hyde back then, according to police reports, but nearly 23 years later, on Tuesday, investigators swarmed his home and arrested him for murder.

WILMINGTON — Take a walk within the Wilmington Police headquarters, down a small hallway and through a single glass door, and you enter a space dedicated to serving the community in real time.

The Wilmington Police Department’s “STING” Center is now in operation and helping solve crimes across the city. The STING (Situational Tactics and Intelligence Nexus Group) Center, located at police headquarters on Bess Street, has been in operation since the start of 2017, according to STING Center Director Malcolm Phelps.

The STING Center has been a year-and a-half in the making — from idea, to funding approval, to developing the space and staffing the center, Phelps said. The police department secured funding with approval from the City of Wilmington in the amount of $228,640 in federal forfeiture and drug seizure funds in May 2015. Students with

Mary Roach meets C.S.I. in this “lively study that’s part whodunit, part sociological study…The result is eminently entertaining and will be devoured by armchair detectives” (Publishers Weekly).

Currently, upwards of forty thousand people in America are dead and unaccounted for. These murder, suicide, and accident victims, separated from their names, are being adopted by the bizarre online world of amateur sleuths. It’s DIY CSI, solving cold cases from the comfort of your living room…

In an “absorbing look at a very odd corner of our world” (The Seattle Times), The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America’s Coldest Cases provides an entree into the gritty and tumultuous world of Sherlock Holmes–wannabes who race to beat out law enforcement—and one another—at matching missing persons with unidentified remains. These web sleuths pore over facial reconstructions (a sort of Facebook for the dead) and other online clues as they vie to solve cold cases and tally up personal scorecards of dead bodies.

There is “no better guide for navigating this multifaceted world than Deborah Halber’s book” (Psychology Today), and The Skeleton Crew probes the macabre underside of the Internet and how even the most ordinary citizen with a laptop and a knack for puzzles can reinvent herself as a web sleuth. “Engaging and artful” (Los Angeles Times Review of Books), this witty and insightful look at the fleeting nature of identity is “brilliant” (The Wall Street Journal).